“Girls are just more drama, right?”
It upsets me an incredible amount every time I hear someone say these words. I cannot count how many times I’ve heard someone say that they cannot stand girls because we are all “dramatic”. Sometimes it is a man disregarding an entire gender in a sentence, but more often that not, it is a woman. As much as I would like to keep myself above the rabble and protest that I am more enlightened and holier than thou, I myself am perhaps the guiltiest. I too, once loved seeing myself as “One of the Boys”.
I spent most my later adolescence hating women. I’ve always identified as a feminist – bar for a brief period in my first year of college – but I found it difficult to reconcile my feminism with my outright dislike for women. I had two close female friends, most the rest of my friend group were guys. None of my relationships within this friend group were in any way romantic, they were all very much just my friends. For some reason though, I could not replicate these platonic relationships with other women. I started repeating that same old saying – “girls are more drama; guys are just easier”. When I came to college, I found myself believing the same things and very quickly I again had a close group of male friends. I began dropping the feminist label. Other women were competition; they were not friends.
It took me until my fourth year of college to realise that I don’t hate other women, I hate the patriarchal indoctrination that has led me – and so many other girls like me – to believe that all other girls are drama. Without realising it, society brings you up to hate women because we are always associated with negative personality traits. We are weak, we are dramatic, we are overly emotional and we are irrational…we are never easy, simple, predictable or fun. This is not the way the genders naturally fall; it is the way we have been conditioned to be. Just as I was conditioned to believe that I alone – apart from one or two others – could hold my head above the overly emotive creatures that I believed women were.
Women are accused of being more drama because we are taught to keep our mouths shut. Society tells us that men are the confident funny ones, and that we are there merely to laugh at and to be companions. When you are taught to keep your mouth shut, you learn to adapt and to never look someone in the eye when they piss you off. Men can argue with each other and be fine within minutes because they are told that they can speak. Women huddle and bitch and silently compete because we are talked over and derided for being “mouthy”. A passive aggressive woman is one who has been conditioned to be that way, an unfair label that society has pasted to her because she should never be allowed to get angry, not when the men are talking.
It takes years to shake yourself free from the shackles that teach you to see your fellow women as competitors and not as friends. I realised recently that though my male friends have told me that I am uncompetitive to a fault, I am incredibly competitive with my female friends. I still find myself irked by my female friends who are perhaps more passive aggressive, before I realised that if this were one of my male friends I would roll my eyes and move on. Women are not the bad things that we sometimes believe we are, we are the products of a society that teaches us to hate ourselves, and hate each other.